Silicon Valley Elite Discuss Journalists Having Too Much Power in Private App

https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/n7w3zw/silicon-valley-elite-discuss-journalists-having-too-much-power-in-private-app

by zdw • 6 years ago

74 79 6 years ago

vice.com

chadlavi• 6 years ago

2020 in a headline

medicineman• 6 years ago

HN in a headline

idlewords• 6 years ago

Maybe they can use some of the excess power to secure the app

mtgp10002• 6 years ago

The call shows how Silicon Valley millionaires, who have been coddled by the press and lauded as innovators and disruptors, fundamentally misunderstand the role of journalism the moment it turns a critical eye to their industry.

No, I would argue that journalists don't understand that their role requires objectivity, and that the whole industry is broken because it has been completely dominated by ideologues, top to bottom, who are blatantly pushing politics onto the masses.

Don't support BLM? Have legitimate criticism? Be prepared to be called out by "journalists" until you fall in line, if you don't get cancelled first. And let's be real, this has been the status quo regarding taboo topics for at least a decade.

Edit: would you all be downvoting if the same journalists were adding pro Trump spin to a sizable proportion (or majority, depending on the outlet) of non-editorial (but editorialized) media? I'm not going to support blatantly partisan writing by ostensibly neutral platforms simply because they represent my politics. We need objective news and the fact that it is impossible to be purely objective is not an excuse to deliberately pollute news articles and headlines with consistent agenda.

wnevets3• 6 years ago

No, I would argue that journalists don't understand that their role requires objectivity

Based on what? Objectivity hasn't been required since the printing press was invented

cameronbrown2• 6 years ago

It's required because a democratic society relies on a healthy press. These are supposed to be scholars, with a code of ethics, dedicated to documentation. Journalists are not supposed to actually interfere in the system they are observing (e.g. by calling for de-platforming) because then they go from being journalists to being activists.

Edit: To be clear, I have no problem with newspapers including opinion articles about de-platforming, but there must be an acknowledgement that there's a difference between journalists and activists/thought leaders. We cannot go on mixing both.

oddlyamused• 6 years ago

Ethics are rarely required but that does not lessen their importance. Are you argueing against having ethics in journalism simply because they were not required when the printing press was invented?

whatshisface• 6 years ago

There are still journalists who do things like reporting, but I agree the growth in significance of opinion relative to reporting, including in some historically very respectable outlets, is a bit worrying.

makomk• 6 years ago

Journalists have long been a self-aggrandizing bunch who think that the only people who'd ever dislike or distrust them are evildoers up to something dubious, though I agree the aggressive social justice activism is new.

noelsusman• 6 years ago

This has been the status quo regarding taboo topics for as long as human language has existed, and I don't think it has much to do with the journalism industry.

ciarannolan• 6 years ago

On Wednesday night, the topic of conversation was Lorenz herself, who had been listening earlier in the conversation but left partway through. After she left, the participants began discussing whether Lorenz was playing "the woman card" when speaking out about her harassment following a Twitter altercation with Srinivasan.
"You can't fucking hit somebody, attack them and just say, 'Hey, I have ovaries and therefore, you can't fight back,'" Felicia Horowitz, founder of the Horowitz Family Foundation and wife of Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz, said.

[...]

"Is Taylor afraid of a brown man on the street? Then she shouldn't be afraid of a brown man in Clubhouse," Srinivasan said. "I have literally done nothing other than one previous tweet. Number one, right? So the whole, you know, talking about tweeting as you know, harassment—completely illegitimate, completely wrong, completely fabricated and just false."

[...]

"When it comes to our industry, there’s a really, really toxic dynamic that exists right now," Nait Jones, an Andreessen Horowitz VC, said on the call while speaking about recent reports about abuse in the tech industry. "Because those stories were so popular and drove so much traffic, they also created a market for more of those stories. They created a pressure on many reporters to find the next one of those stories inside of a fast growing tech company because those stories play very well on Twitter, especially around protecting vulnerable people."

1. The lack of self awareness is incredible.

2. What happened to us? Were people always this nasty and identitarian?

tossmeout• 6 years ago

I fail to see how any of the quotes you provided are nasty or lack self-awareness.

bluntfang7• 6 years ago

(capital M, T) Me Too

_y5hn• 6 years ago

1. Yes

2. Yes

Answers to both your questions requires self-introspection and experience with diversity of people from all levels, so will go wooosh over most people's heads, or they will bin it as "sort of PC".

We're being given a mirror that creates what we see in it.

Yes, this effectively perpetuates crisis.

kanox• 6 years ago

The lack of self awareness is incredible.

I mostly agree that journalism is an overwhelmingly toxic profession.

ryanSrich• 6 years ago

1.) In all fairness, those are two different people making those statements. It lacks a certain self-awareness I agree, but it's not to the same degree if it had been the same person.

2.) I genuinely believe it's due to social media. Twitter specifically is very divisive and that's where most journalists gather. The feedback loops are too rewarding. You call out a "tech bro" for saying something racist and you're rewarded with thousands of likes and retweets. It drives people to seek that out at all costs.

s1artibartfast3• 6 years ago

Do you mean the lack of self awareness on the part of Vice? I thought the third quote could have been something out of The Onion.

Breaking news! VCs disparage outrage driven click bait. Click to read more...

rexreed• 6 years ago

In Silicon Valley, this is how it's always been. Just hidden. It's like this in the finance industry as a whole as well.

DidISayTooMuch• 6 years ago

This is just people having conversations about protecting their interest. I'm sure if we spied on the "non-elite" people talking to their spouses or friends, there will be some controversial stuff.

I don't even think there's anything controversial here. This is just a fluff article.

gonehome3• 6 years ago

This article is missing some of the critical context that lead to this from Twitter.

Summarized here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-July-2020-Twitter-spat-bet...

I think Taylor comes across extremely negatively here and the spin in this Vice article just makes it worse.

Basically Taylor puts up a mean tweet about the Away CEO’s comments on the media (without actually engaging in the content of those comments).

Balaji responds to the tweet with the same wording Taylor used, but directed at Taylor herself (to point out the meanness).

Taylor tweets a cropped response image of only Balaji’s response and plays victim, rallying media people behind her (things escalate) - eventually they surreptitiously record this clubhouse conversation and write a hit piece without taking any responsibility for anything.

It’s all very high school and the journalists come across extremely negatively to me. If anything this proves Balaji’s point.

I should spend less time on Twitter.

Pils3• 6 years ago

The Quora piece contains a lot of conjecture on the part of the author, who clearly has an ax to grind with the media. If you don't believe the conspiracy that "the Verge media outlet is specifically targeting female founders" the argument completely falls apart.

If you read the original Away article, Korey clearly crossed multiple lines and was creating a toxic work environment. As a tech worker, I think its right and good for people covering tech to "call out" this sort of revisionist history.

gonehome3• 6 years ago

I don’t disagree that the original Away article showed bad behavior.

Both things can be true though, the slack messages/toxic environment from Korey in that first article can be bad and it can be wrong for Taylor to mean tweet without addressing the content of any of Korey’s points about the media (which are valid), and everything Lorenz did to escalate and mislead from there can be wrong too.

For clarity the media comments Korey wrote that kicked this recent thing off are separate from that original article.

I have even less confidence that the original Away article is entirely true now given the journalist behavior around this second issue.

encoderer• 6 years ago

Every VC nerd tweeting about Clubhouse reminds me of the Robert Scoble influencer strategy for the Google Glass.

askafriend• 6 years ago

This is one of the best takes I've seen. Ahh....Scoble....I remember those days.

protomyth2• 6 years ago

I think the peek was an episode essentially about cut-and-paste and on the web which had something to do with Ray Ozzie on the Gilmore Gang.

protomyth2• 6 years ago

Its only fun to have an exclusive hangout that doesn't let in the unwashed masses if you can brag to the unwashed masses.

tqi• 6 years ago

One thing I noticed when browsing the twitter thread where Taylor Lorenz tweeted about Balaji Srinivasan was the consistency of responses. Every single response from a verified journalist defended Lorenz and condemned the Srinivasan tweet, and every single response from a tech person defended Srinivasan and pointed to Lorenzs own tweet about Stephanie Korey.

As far as I saw, neither side engaged with the other's arguments, and the battle lines were drawn with remarkable consistency.

dsfdsfsdfasd• 6 years ago

The fact that they arent even aware of the contradiction of saying that it's journalists who have too much power while complaining that someone is powerless because they don't have a lot of social media followers or that journalists are driven by the need to go viral on social media is scary to say the least.

Pils3• 6 years ago

I didn't really see that. For example, DHH was extremely critical of Balaji's shenanigans. It seemed like rationalist twitter (most likely due to the anti-NYT sentiment relating to the SSC drama) + some VCs vs the rest of Online Twitter. Taylor's beat is usually of the more liminal variety rather than red meat, culture war content, so this whole situation feels like the result of misplaced animosity.

mc13• 6 years ago

DHH has always been against the VC culture.

TimTheTinker8• 6 years ago

The writer of this article is a journalist, so the portrayal may be less than fair.

That being said, and speaking generally (not about VCs or rich people in particular), something is going terribly wrong when a private person can be publicly shamed in the press 15 years from now for doing something that is completely normal and socially acceptable today, and lose their job as a result.

catalogia3• 6 years ago

a private person can be publicly shamed in the press 15 years from now for doing something that is completely normal and socially acceptable today

This industry created the tools which made it feasible. Before social media, most people simply didn't have a public record of things they said years ago. This industry also created the platforms on which this sort of behavior flourishes. Journalists may have some bad habits, but the tech industry gave them nuclear weapons.

TimTheTinker8• 6 years ago

Good point. But it takes a journalist with a specific purpose in mind, and a public that cares to be outraged in the first place about private people whose specific past behaviors have no bearing on history, to dig back into the past and bring such stuff out into the public eye, with specific names and dates attached.

bluntfang7• 6 years ago

So as long as you do bad shit and get away with it for 15 years no one should judge you for it?

pmorici2• 6 years ago

Not what the OP said. Even the US constitution recognizes that Ex post facto laws are bad and specifically prohibits their passage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law#United_State...

s1artibartfast3• 6 years ago

I think you missed a critical part of the post you are responding to.

...for doing something that is completely normal and socially acceptable

The question has to do with the growing application of moral presentism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_histo...

product50• 6 years ago

If ever there was a one sided article, it was this. Doesn't even talk about the nuances of the problems. Journalists are like how dare tech people are criticizing us - but it is totally ok to do it the other way round. The difference now though is, because of social media, prominent tech personalities have much bigger audiences.

Sometimes I am thankful like services like Twitter and Facebook exists since these types of biases are for everyone to see and make independent calls on. Before, it would have been like whatever NYTimes said would be taken as the truth as there would have been no platform available to present your pov.

partdavid• 6 years ago

Yeah, I even started reading this one with an uncritical eye but the resentment just seeps through. There's even an aside where the author just has to provide this parenthetical counterargument to the accusation that journalists seek clicks... right there in a supposed news story, a whole paragraph of editorial argument.

It really wasn't very useful even to tease out whatever issues were supposedly being discussed.

zozbot234• 6 years ago

ISTM that the article is very explicitly taking sides; it doesn't even claim to be providing some neutral view of the controversy, it just advances the journalists' own point of view. A biased article will always get more clicks.

ryanhuff2• 6 years ago

If I took what Facebook presents to me through my feed as a news source to influence my POV, I might believe that Obama is a secret Muslim, or that Trump was done away with years ago, and is instead an alien, or that Helen Hunt, the actress, is involved in international child trafficking, or perhaps that COVID-19 was put in place to control the world's population. In my experience, all Facebook does is reveal and feed upon people's worst needs, desires, fears. I'll take the NY Times over this any day of the week.

catalogia3• 6 years ago

It's not like the NYTs doesn't have a history of spreading unfounded 'conspiracy theories' too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_aluminum_tubes#September...

In terms of damage done to society, I think all the examples you list combined still pale in comparison to that single example.

sukilot• 6 years ago

Flagged for petty bickering. I don't understand why people post and upvote chatter they would be downvoted to oblivion if it were posted as comments on HN. We can do better.

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

Meh.

"Powerful people complain about journalists. –News at 11"

This has been going on since the day the first broadsheets were written in cuneiform.

What matters, is what people do, when it comes to stuff like this. I'd say the Ebay folks, sending the bloggers pig's head masks was more alarming.

“Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” –Mark Twain

buboard• 6 years ago

too long to read ;

balaji has a beef with mainstream journalists since many months ago, and probably rightly so. I can't help but feel however that this whole outrage is covert advertising for Clubhouse which (even though i am not famous enough to use) seems basically a repackaging of the decades-old concept of phone hotlines.

That said, balaji is right, the media overplayed their role as arbiters of truth and are now losing. I d trust my twitter feed better than any paper.

lliamander• 6 years ago

Legal Analysis: "You really Shouldn't Record Clubhouse Calls"

https://prestonbyrne.com/2020/07/02/you-really-shouldnt-reco...

dang• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23718317

str33t_punk• 6 years ago

This article employs the same malicious cropping Taylor Lorenz did that made people so mad. I think the origin story is not that she complained about the CEO of Away, it was that when Balaji copied her exact wording, she cropped out the origin picture that showed this and claimed harassment.

Journalists seem incredibly tone deaf -- do they ever wonder why people dislike them? It's because they employ so many subtle lies like this all the time.

Journalists really need to get off twitter - it ruins their credibility. If this is how they act for some crap drama, it calls into question all sorts of 'important' articles and op-eds

gadders• 6 years ago

This aside from the author of the article made me laugh:

(In 2020, the idea that fishing for “clicks” to drive ad revenue is a successful or even common business model is a fallacy. Publications that rely exclusively on advertising are failing at an astonishing rate; financially, many journalistic outlets are increasingly moving away from an ad-based revenue model driven by traffic, and instead focus on live events, subscriptions, optioning their articles to movie studios, and other models that rely on having a dedicated readership that trusts the publication).

Yes, clickbait is a really uncommon business model, and loads of Vice articles are being made into movies. The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking.

renewiltord2• 6 years ago

The kind of journalism that these people do is dead as a professional information-delivery job because it is outcompeted by obsessive bloggers since the advent of the ubiquitous Internet. It is an entertainment business and behaves like an entertainment business, which means that the participants are incentivized to create buzz, etc.

If your news sources are primarily these, then you’re missing out on a lot of actionable information. All that stuff is now in private conversations because the general audience is gotcha-obsessed. P

ardy42• 6 years ago

The kind of journalism that these people do is dead as a professional information-delivery job because it is outcompeted by obsessive bloggers since the advent of the ubiquitous Internet.

Eh, not so much. That's not much different than saying that journalism has been out-competed by the Facebook News Feed. It might be true that they've "outcompeted" journalism by pulling the rug out from under its revenue model, but they certainly haven't out-competed it from an information-delivery perspective.

Blogs/social media is full of grossly unreliable information, for the most part due to the lack of professional journalistic standards. If they're amateur, then they have greatly reduced coverage due to lack of time and experience. If they're professional, then they've either recreated traditional journalism (with all the same difficulties) or they exist explicitly as PR to push some agenda. I'm reminded of the hordes or mattress review blogs that are mostly owned by or tacking kickbacks from some mattress company or other (see https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...).

The idea that blogs could replace journalism is a dated, idealistic, early-00s idea. The best they ever managed to consistently do was to was replicate the hot air of the opinion pages. Sure, occasionally amateur blog gets a scoop, but they're relatively few and far between, separated by chasms of noise.

renewiltord2• 6 years ago

In the following sentence from my original post, I intended for the (now) highlighted section to have semantic significance:

he kind of journalism that these people do

rdiddly• 6 years ago

Dumb piece about a dumb conversation. But for the record, journalists gain trust & responsibility by keeping their opinions out of it. If you give free rein to your silly opinions, all you do is gain the blind obedience of those who already agree with you, which is easy. Easy. And is the default mode on Twitter, i.e. the "mooks and knights" model - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/

Those who want to be treated with respect like real grown-up journalists need to act like real grown-up journalists and not just common Twitter trash. What am I supposed to do with something like "Silicon Valley millionaires, who have been coddled..."? If I'm looking to be outraged and join a mob, I'm all good, I've reached my destination. If on the other hand I'm looking for facts/journalism, what should I do at this point? Ask for a source? Where was the coddling? Who did the coddling? What kind of coddling? When did this coddling take place? Just asking the usual 5-6 journalistic questions about it makes you realize how fucking tedious this particular bit of "news" is. It's actually not news, not a fact. It's a mean-spirited, trashy little aside. (Does this automatically mean I support "millionaires" exploiting and demeaning others? No, you idiot.)

Want a grim laugh? Picture Hitler ranting & raving at a podium, and that sentence appearing as the subtitle. "THEY HAVE BEEN CODDLED AND WILL BE CODDLED NO MORE!!!" crowd: "Heeeiiill!" Hitler was not a journalist.

All the little side commentary (I'm already too bored to cite other examples but it does get worse from there) sounds like something out of Idiocracy. Flagging this for being intellectually beneath us.

s1artibartfast3• 6 years ago

This article is a great example of the phenomenon being discussed. The article intentionally misleads the reader and distorts statements. For example, look at the selective omission from Nait Jones statement. They were clearly trying to portray him as categorically opposed to journalists reporting on abuse.

"When it comes to our industry, there’s a really, really toxic dynamic that exists right now,"

Next sentence omitted: There were very very impactfull stories about abuse inside fast growing tech companies, that proved to be very valuable stories, that stopped that abuse from happening.

"Because those stories were so popular and drove so much traffic, they also created a market for more of those stories. They created a pressure on many reporters to find the next one of those stories inside of a fast growing tech company because those stories play very well on Twitter, especially around protecting vulnerable people."

Silicon Valley Elite Discuss Journalists Having Too Much Power in Private App

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